Phil Robinson

“ Months ago, when the sun was killing the northern blood within us, the lizards lay happily basking on the hot stones, the coppery danais flitted at ease about the shrubs, above which the air of mid-day stood shimmering and tremulous with heat, and our Aryan brothers, stretched in the shade of tree and wall, were content with God’s earth. ”

“ The Christmas bills are a skeleton to some; but even with the butcher, the baker, and the grocer dancing a cannibalic war-dance at the area-gate, there is hardly a home where Christmas is not “merry,” and Hans Andersen’s sexton, who struck the boy for laughing on Christmas Eve, is considered a prodigy of infamy. But “the cold weather,” as we in India are pleased to call the months at the end and beginning of the year, does not suggest mirthfulness to our Aryan brother; it shrivels him up. ”

“ There was once, they say, a maiden, exceedingly beautiful, and modest as she was beautiful. To her the admiration of men was a sorrow from morning to night, and her life was made weary with the importunities of her lovers. ”

“ If Nature would only meet me half way, or even the robins of the country wear red waistcoats instead of red seats to their trousers, I would try and squeeze some seasonable festivity into my thoughts. ”

“ Swinburne has said that they gave them also life enough, perhaps, to make the bitterness of humanity keen to them; and that they gave them light enough to illustrate the deadliness of all life's pleasures, and to show them the way to their graves. ”

“ It is curious that those notes which, among birds, give expression to the unamiable feelings of anger and animosity, are more musical than the notes of love and pleasure. Among human beings no passion has evoked such sweet song as love. Among birds, however, the voice of love is more often wanting in sweetness. The bittern, when it calls to its mate, fills the dark reed-beds with the ghostliest sound that man has ever heard from the throat of a bird; the cluck of the wooing cock, that crows so grandly when aroused to wrath or jealousy, is ridiculous ”

“ Yes; at home the children are sitting up, I know, to see Christmas Day in; and waiting, they grow tired. The moment arrives, the hand is at the hour, a chestnut is absorbing all attention; when on a sudden, with a clash from all the steeples, the mad bells fling out their music on the wild night. The great chestnut question is postponed, and, starting from the hearthrug, the little voices chime together, “A merry Christmas;” ”

“ He is too cold to concern himself about his wares, for when his neighbors want pots they will, he knows, come to him; if they do not want pots, advertisements and invitations are thrown away. Shouting is a mere waste of carbon. ”

“ His cow, I think, must be dead now, for he seems to have nothing to do but to loaf about with my camp, waiting for me to pay him the four annas of wages which he tries to prove is due to him.
Now, what a strange thing human nature is! Here I have been protesting for the last hour that I had no Christmas foolery left in me; and yet I have this moment paid that punkah-coolie the four annas he has no claim to — and which, on principle, as I have told my wife every day for the last month, I have refused for two months to pay him — just because it was Christmas Day! ”

“ In the next house there are no wares to sell, but in the centre, on a rag of carpet, sits a puffy man, painting, with much facial contortion, and frequent applications of his numbed fingers to the charcoal burning near him, the face of a mud monkey-god. ”

“ So opens the Prologue of a modern poet’s story of how, in those olden days when dolphins knew good music when they heard it, and love it was that made the world go round, — the Strong Man came down to the Tyrian merchant-vessel swinging in Mycenæ Bay, and, taking the helm himself when the great east wind began to blow its fiercest, steered straight for the island where the daughters of old Hesperus the Wise guarded the tree with the golden fruit. It is a December poem, and yet the scene of it is laid in a land where the boughs were blossomed and “unknown flowers bent down before their feet;” ”